Details of Dr Dominik Bonatz's Munro Lecture. Event details Lecture title: From Archaeology to Anthropology: Exploring the Origin and Change of Complex Societies in Ancient Indonesia and Syria Date: 24 January 2008, 5.15pm Venue: Archaeology Lecture Theatre, Infirmary Street, Edinburgh Lecture abstract The lecture focuses on two recent archaeological projects in two distinct regions: Tell Fakhriye in the Habur basin of northern Syria and the highlands of Sumatra in Indonesia respectively. While Tell Fakhriye may have formed a central place of administration during the period of Assyrian hegemony over northern Syria in the late 2nd millennium BC, the highlands of Sumatra have hosted a megalithic complex which overlaps in chronology with the realm of the Srivijaya kingdom in the Sumatran lowlands at the beginning of the 2nd millennium AD. The approach to put the archaeology of both regions in a comparable perspective will be mainly an anthropological one. Since they underwent major social and economical changes due to the impact of foreign political systems in the past, it will be asked in which way such impacts have shaped a certain degree of complexity in a given society. The lecture furthermore aims to examine those forms of control mechanisms that constitute, define, configure and govern space and in this way assign social, administrative, political and cultural significance to it. This article was published on 2024-08-28
